Well, Amazon has finally opened up to the glossy world of Microsoft by supporting Windows OS instances in the EC2 cloud. SQL Server and Server are the big items that you want to deploy and both are available.  I actually did not realize they also have a 99.95% SLA in place which is one of the items that we have been waiting for.  Actually what we really want is a RightScale esque management console and it looks like the roll-out schedulers were listening.

The upcoming features of the EC2:

The upcoming features of the EC2:

Load Balancing — Enables you to automatically balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. You will be able to intelligently distribute load within or across Availability Zones, without worrying about load balancing hardware or software solutions.

Auto-scaling — Grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements, automatically managing usage of the AWS cloud on your behalf. The auto-scaling capability will monitor your pre-set capacity thresholds and automatically add or remove compute capacity based on your application usage, helping you optimize your use of resources.

Monitoring — Provides real-time monitoring of operational metrics within Amazon EC2, providing even better visibility into your usage of the AWS cloud. These metrics can be aggregated across multiple dimensions including Amazon EC2 instances, Availability Zones, and time slots. With this Monitoring service, you will be able to view your usage of the AWS cloud in much the same way that you can see operational metrics of your own hosted data center.

Management Console — Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets you configure, manage and access your AWS cloud resources.